AN OPTIMIST
I cannot hope to describe to you my dismay at finding myself back in
that ancient temple of Tzin Piaôu, nor the dislike with which I
looked into the eyes of that old heathen priest, those slant eyes
where cynical amusement, like a little, undying flame, danced and
flickered.
"And so," said the bland old gentleman, raising himself languidly on
his hollowed slab of stone, "and so you find the company of the
ladies more agreeable than mine? I do not wonder. How did you leave
them all in the temple of Lal?" It would be impossible to indicate
the sly mockery which rustled in his tone.
"So that was your doing, too?" I asked.
He moved a deprecatory hand, smiling blandly through me into space.
"I may have been used as an unworthy instrument," he murmured, "but
for most of your experience, I fancy, you're indebted to the Little
Gods themselves. Did you find amusement, or instruction, was
it?--forgive me, I forget--in the Games they showed you?"
"I'm very tired of your Little Gods, if they exist," I said bluntly,
for he made me angry. "As I told you once, and as I would tell them
to their faces, I think them cowards. I ask you again, do they never
give their victims a fair chance? Is there never a single plaything
of theirs which, fighting bravely and in good faith, is permitted to
win? Are the dice always cogged?"
"You like to see them win?" my old heathen priest asked in bland
surprise. "What a very commonplace taste; for people are always
winning what they strive for, thousands of them every day. It's only
the exceptions, the surprises, which are interesting. I thought you
asked to see Life through my eyes. But since your taste runs that
way--" he yawned ever so slightly behind his hand--"You'll excuse me,
won't you?" he apologized, "but this is an hour which I invariably
devote to a nap." He made a little careless, dismissing gesture.
"Wander where you choose," said he, "and watch men fight, since
that's your taste, and win--what they may win."
It was my dismissal, and there I saw him last, as I had seen him
first, lying motionless on his hollowed slab, smiling blandly,
cynically, into Emptiness, with light yet bitter mockery in his smile.
Then, or so it seemed to me, I wandered far and long, and saw many
men striving mightily for many things, and most of them were winners,
and most of them, winning, found themselves no nearer their hearts'
desires. But among them I marked three, and have remembered them,
whose striving seemed to me not wholly without interest. The first
of them was a very common-seeming man indeed, and the only thing
about him which made him worthy of remark was, that he was an
optimist.
Samar is a sorry strip of island which rises in gray-green,
commonplace, and yet sinister ugliness from a green and treacherous
sea. Its coasts are a desolation of over-thrifty vegetation. Its
interior, so far as it has been explored, is a wilderness of forest
and precipitous mountains. And the people who inhabit it are worthy
of the place, outcasts and refugees from other islands, outlawed men
for whom no other spot of earth holds a future.
Toward the end of 1901, soldiers and marines and sailors, the 41st
Infantry, U.S.A., among them, were rushed to Samar to punish the
murderers of Balangiga and cleanse the plague-spot of the Philippines
of its spawn. The work proved to be difficult and slow. The blazing
summer had darkened into such winter as the Eastern tropics know, a
season of lowering skies and deluges of rain, and dank cold and
boisterous winds, and still the quarry flitted elusively from
stronghold to stronghold of the untracked mountains, emerging at rare
intervals to strike with murderous suddenness at unexpected places
and then disappear, as hard to bring to bay as any other beast of
prey which makes cunning atone for its lack of strength and courage.
At Sabey, a hopeless town half-way up the east coast of the island,
Company B of the 41st was stationed, as hard-fisted, hard-mouthed,
hard-living, hard-fighting a set of terriers as ever was enlisted.
Its Captain, one Burrell, delighted in catching his pets wild and
taming them to his peculiar taste. B's ranks, for the most part,
were filled by transfer from other organizations whose officers were
glad to turn over their black sheep. Burrell, by some method of his
own, speedily made soldiers, his sort of soldiers, of them, and they
swore by him.
It was unusual for B to sit in garrison when the 41st was afield, for
the company had a reputation consonant with its character, and was
welcome at the front whenever there was action. But all that autumn
it was held in quarters, while the rain drummed on the iron roof and
reports came in of little battles north and south and west.
"Ev'rybody had a man's size grouch on, fr'm th' Old Man down," they
reported afterward. "Ev'rybody but just John Henry Sullivan, him we
called Peaceful Henry. You couldn't hammer a grouch onto Peaceful
with an axe."
Sullivan was the humorist of the company, a long, lank, freckled
figure-of-fun who was tolerated, ordinarily, though unmercifully
mocked, for a certain likable simplicity of mind and a childish
friendliness for everything. But that fall his antics palled on B.
"They was times when we'd a been glad to kill him," as they said, "if
it hadn't been for havin' to look forrard to a long enlistment with
him down below."
But at the very end of the year a hope of cornering the enemy
appeared, and the spirits of B Company rose accordingly. Midway of
its length, Samar narrows till a scant thirty-five miles separates
the long rollers of the Pacific shore from the quieter waters of the
Visayan Sea. So, at least, the triangulation of the Coast Survey
bore witness, then. Until that winter there was no record of men who
had crossed the savage island. But a local tradition asserted that
an old and long-abandoned trail led from Sabey on the east coast,
that very Sabey where B was stationed, to Nalang on the west.
If that ancient trail could be opened once more, Samar would be cut
in two, the activity of the skulking outlaws would be impeded, and a
scheme of effective reconcentration would be possible at last. The
men of B Company felt that their old luck was with them when the duty
of making the first reconnaissance of the old trail fell to them.
They were ready to move at once, and soon after reveille, on the
morning of December 25th, Captain Burrell, Lieutenant Roberts, and
twenty men, all dressed in the blue and khaki of field service, and
bearing haversacks bulging with four days' rations, assembled on the
beach at Sabey to make an attempt at crossing Samar.
It was an inauspiciously gray and threatening morning. Behind the
explorers, breakers crashed thunderously on the sand, and a roaring
northeast monsoon whipped spume about in frothy sheets. Before them,
the wilderness lay grim and forbidding, in the cold light. But they
accepted the rawness and the gloom with the indifference of long
acquaintance. Four marches straight westward, of ten miles each at
most, child's play to men like them, should bring them to Nalang.
There was no breath of adventure in the air.
Yet of the party which faced the hills that morning, seven lie within
the shadow still, and only one came out again unaided, seventeen days
later, to report that somewhere behind him fourteen men of B,
including the Old Man who made it B, lay starving and delirious with
fever.
On the morning of the start, they had of course no premonition of all
this. Burrell and Roberts waved careless farewells to the one lady
of Sabey, the post surgeon's young wife, the men grumbled aimlessly
at the prospect of a wet march and a wet camp, and Sullivan, settling
his haversack strap more comfortably, grinned at the disappointed
ones in front of quarters who could not go. "Reckon we'll locate
that overland route for the Sumner this time, sure," he remarked,
with a fatuous attempt at humor.
"Fall in," the Captain ordered, and the little column set its front
westward and swung off along the drenched banks of Sabey River.
Four days later, as an early nightfall was closing down, eighteen of
the party struggled to the summit of a half-wooded ridge in the
interior of the island, and the worn-out men straightened up with
momentary eagerness to peer into the cloud-hung west. Only the
blankness of further up-tumbled ridges and black waves of forest
veiled in sheets of rain lay before them, and to north, south, and
east as well. Nowhere on the circle of the horizon was a leaden
gleam of the guiding sea.
The men seemed dazed. They had made their four marches, of far more
than ten miles each, it seemed, at such cost of strength and courage
as no one who has not travelled in that land can comprehend. They
had made the last march on all but a remnant of their food, and the
baffling trail they followed had led them nowhere. An hour before it
had vanished in a thicket. Since then they had cut a trail with
their bayonets, pushing for this ridge in the hope that from its
summit they might see the coast at last. Instead, they found that
they were lost in the Samar hills. Faint from hunger and exertion,
chilled to the bone from tramping in clammy clothing and sleeping in
drenched blankets, with shoes that burst from their swollen feet like
pulp and hung in shreds, already halting of speech and step with the
burning weakness of fever, half a dozen of them, they stood there in
the beating downpour, stunned, and daunted.
All this had come to them in four days,--that was the paralyzing
fact. It appalled them that all their pride of strength should have
vanished in that little space, when other days were coming, how many
no one knew, of uglier promise. Foiled, while they still had food
and strength, by the task they had set themselves, each day of
increased weakness and privation now would call them to increased
exertion till the sea was reached--the sea which might, and might
not, lie beyond the furthest of those mountains to the west, if it
was west. Dumbly they stared at them, avoiding each other's eyes.
Captain Burrell, still weakened by the wound he got in front of
Tientsin, was one of the hardest-hit of the fever-victims, and his
teeth chattered when he talked, but he retained a humor dryer than
the weather. "I reckon we'll camp right here," he said. "H'm. We
can't quite fetch the coast to-night, and this ridge is well-drained,
anyway. H'm."
The least weary of the men smiled forlornly in response to the spirit
that lived in their Old Man, and Sullivan laughed outright. "I've
been lookin' for a well-dreened place like this to start my
cactus-farm in, sir," he remarked. Already the formalities of rank
had vanished, and discipline meant obedience for the common good, not
ceremony.
"Might do it, by irrigating," said the Captain. "H'm." He cast a
sharp glance at his one unapprehensive subordinate. "The rest of you
camp right here," he ordered. "Sullivan and I are going back along
to stir up those loafers who fell out."
"See here, sir," Lieutenant Roberts cried, in half-hearted protest,
for every inch of his six feet of young body was aching dully, "that
leg of yours--"
"Is a corker," said the Captain shortly. "H'm. Come along,
Sullivan."
An hour later the two, staggering with sleep, herded the last of the
sodden, half-delirious stragglers up to the fire which spluttered in
the wet and gloom, and the sick men sprawled obediently among their
unconscious fellows. For an instant the officer stared down at them.
"Hopeful lot, ain't they?" he muttered. "H'm."
"It sure looks some like a graveyard, Captain," said Sullivan
cheerfully. The Captain glanced at him again.
"Don't you ever get--blue, Sullivan?" he asked curiously.
Sullivan seemed doubtful. "I--I do' know's I ever thought much about
it, sir," he said.
"I reckoned not," said the Captain. "H'm. Well, don't. Go to
sleep."
"I was thinkin' I'd keep th' fire goin' a while, it looked so kind of
homelike," Sullivan objected. "I ain't much sleepy. You turn in,
sir."
"I'm not sleepy, either," said the other gruffly. "H'm. Roll in
now. _Pronto_." Obediently Sullivan sank down where he stood, and
was asleep.
Burrell sat long, brooding over the fire, listening to the deep
breaths and smothered groanings of his men. One of them babbled in
delirium, piteously, for a moment, and the Captain went and soothed
him, awkwardly. Then he stood above him, gazing off into the gulf of
blackness to the west. He glanced down at the muttering soldier, and
away again into the night. "God damn you," he said to the Island of
Samar gravely, courteously, as one might deliver a challenge to
mortal combat.
Next morning they breakfasted on what was left of their food,
consuming all but a precious emergency ration of two tins of bacon, a
pound and a half in all. Then they pushed on in what was meant to be
a last desperate dash for the coast, going down into a long wide
valley smothered in primeval forest. Every trail had vanished, each
step of advance had to be slashed from a jungle of underbrush and
creepers, and for all their suffering they gained a scant five miles.
They halted at nightfall in a little opening, where they shed their
equipments as they stood, and sprawled among them. Sullivan and the
Captain, going back for the many stragglers, failed to discover two
of them.
They camped that night without food or fire, in a rain that came down
harder than ever, if such a thing could be. Next day, without
breakfast, they resumed their dogged advance, halting often to rest
and search for food. But in that dead season the forest yielded
nothing more edible than leaves and bark, and a few woody seed pods
like rose-haws in size and shape.
"Hell-apples," Sullivan named those, after he had had opportunity to
observe their effects. "They look all right, and they taste all
right," he explained, "but they sure do raise hell with your insides."
The men munched them greedily, despite their uncomforting properties.
A time was coming when a rotting log that harbored store of grubs
would seem a treasure-house to them.
The bayonets did not hack out a trail as rapidly as they had on the
day before, and they had made no more than three miles and a half
when night shut down. Yet, slow as the advance was, only half a
dozen men were up with it, and, when Burrell would have gone back for
the others, his wounded leg crumpled under him. Without a word,
Lieutenant Roberts joined Sullivan, and it was midnight when the pair
brought in the last straggler they could find. Three were still
missing, and the Captain forbade further search. "They'll have to
take a chance," he said. "H'm."
When the next day broke, merely a lightening of the gloom under the
dripping branches, Lieutenant Roberts rose stiffly from the pool that
had formed about him in the night and stood, blue-lipped and shaking,
over the Captain, whose tortured leg would not permit him to do more
than raise himself on one elbow. The two officers faced the
situation together. They needed no words. All about them lay the
forest of that deadly central valley. Somewhere beyond it,
unattainably far for the majority of the men, rose the western
rampart of the island. For thirty-six hours they had had no food but
hell-apples, the fever was growing on them, and three-fourths of the
command, any doctor would have said, could not march a mile.
The Captain spoke at last, staring sullenly at the ground. "Call the
men, will you?" he asked. "H'm. I reckon it's time to split."
Roberts' face brightened. "I'll make it out all right," he declared.
"Never felt huskier in my life. I could break world's records from
here to a plate of grub."
Only ten men of the seventeen who were left responded to the call.
The others, roused from the stupor of deep sleep, merely stared up
vacantly and muttered, so Roberts let them lie. "Boys," said
Burrell, when they had formed a little circle round him, "'most of us
need a lay-off. H'm. So we're goin' to rest up here for a couple of
days and then push on slow. Mr. Roberts and a couple of you can plug
ahead now, though, so's to have some grub cooked up to meet us. I
reckon we'll raise a famine in Nalang. H'm. Roberts, who'll you
take with you?"
Despite the lightness of the officer's tone, every man knew what he
asked for, and as the subaltern's eyes swept round the circle,
shrewdly weighing each man's serviceability, shoulders squared and
faces took on looks of quite ferocious good cheer.
"I seen you first, sir," Terry Clancy cried all at once, and stumbled
to his feet.
"I've got a fine healthy appetite, myself," Sullivan remarked
plaintively. "I'm with you for a sprint, Lieutenant."
"You're too old, Clancy," said Roberts kindly. "I want yearlings for
this. And you, Sullivan,"--his voice held good-natured
condescension, as he glanced down at his own bulging chest and sturdy
limbs,--"you're too spindly. You're liable to double up, any time."
At last he chose Red Hannigan and Peter Kelley, two men of his own
kind, bull-necked, thick-limbed and heavy-shouldered. The Captain
handed him one of the two tins of bacon. "We'll look for you back,"
he said, "long about--H'm--day after to-morrow. Or day after that.
H'm."
The eyes of the officers glinted into each other. "Sure," said
Roberts, gravely shaking his commander's hand. "Come along, you
fellows."
Twelve days later a party from Nalang found Lieutenant Roberts, the
first white man to win across Samar, sitting contentedly on the beach
in the sunshine, forty miles above the town, eating snails and
aimlessly tossing the shells at what had been his feet. Red Hannigan
and Peter Kelley were never found, for Roberts never could remember
where they left him.
After the departure of the rescue party, apathy settled over the camp
in the valley. The Captain straightened his bad leg and lay back
with closed eyes. The others lay about him, dozing. Even the worst
of the fever-victims only cried out occasionally. Beside the relief
of not having to march, cold and wet and hunger and sickness were
little things.
It was well on in the afternoon when Clancy was roused by a sound
which puzzled him. Stumbling out of camp, he came upon a sight which
struck him speechless.
Sullivan, sitting astride a mouldering log, was wrenching off strips
of sodden bark and digging his fingers deep into the punky wood.
Suddenly the meaning of it burst on Terry. "Quit that!" he cried.
"Quit it, I tell you."
Sullivan, glancing up, had the grace to redden. Then he lowered his
eyes, and resumed his pecking. "I don't care," he muttered
defiantly. "I'm hungry enough to eat anything."
Clancy turned away. Presently, from behind a clump of undergrowth,
there came the sound of ripping bark. For a while Sullivan, still
busy, preserved discreet silence. But his grin broadened slowly, and
at last he sang out, "Hi, Terry! Pick for the little white ones.
The others has kind of soured, I reckon."
There was no answer. After a time another man limped out, watched
Sullivan for a little, and soon the sounds of the chase rose from
another secluded spot. There was no element of sociability in those
meals as yet.
Then came a slow succession of days not so tremendously hard to bear,
as the pangs of hunger faded into the milder discomfort of
starvation, and the fever felled them one by one. Days so like each
other that only the calendar notched in the grip of the Captain's
revolver kept their count.
Each morning fewer of them were able to join Sullivan in the search
for grubs and seed pods, and he began bringing them what spoil of the
forest he could find. They took it unquestioningly from his hand,
those who were conscious, like children. Indeed, as the days passed,
the rough fellows turned for all their needs to the man who had been
their butt, and he never failed to meet their primitive wants. That
lanky body of his held a surprising store of tough endurance, and he
seemed fever-proof. As for his cheerfulness, it was inexhaustible.
Big Terry Clancy and the Captain were the last to yield to their
weakness, refusing, gently, the food Sullivan brought them. Hard men
as those of B were, not one of them, in his sane moments, spoke a
word of discontent or of complaint during those days. I like to
remember that of them, as I like to remember that I never heard an
American regular soldier, traditional grumbler that he is, grumble
when he had a reason for it.
On the fourth evening after the departure of Lieutenant Roberts, the
tenth night out from Sabey and the fifth since they had eaten food
for human beings, Sullivan was the only man left stirring in the
camp. In spite of the rain--and I would have you read always to the
torrential beat of a tropical downpour and the soughing of cold,
damp-laden winds--he had managed, with the last of the matches and
the powder from half a dozen cartridges, to kindle a fire in a fallen
trunk, and had kept it going, and had dragged his comrades round it.
He sat beside the Captain, and presently, glancing down, he saw that
the officer's eyes were fixed steadily on him. "Anything you want,
sir?" he asked.
"How many of us," Burrell asked abruptly, "are what you could call
fit?"
Sullivan surveyed the prostrate men about him. "Well," he said
imperturbably, "I reckon there's me. And you."
"H'm," the Captain grunted, and even in his sickness his eyes
brightened. "Then," he said, "I reckon it's up to--us. H'm."
For a moment he mused, and then he went on, "It's no use trying
Nalang. Roberts tried that. But if some one could get back to Sabey
I think some of the men would try--"
"The boys would get you out of hell, sir," said Sullivan gravely, "if
you sent th'm word."
"Think so?" said Burrell. "H'm. Well, to-morrow you'd better send
word to 'em." The Captain's eyes had a queer brightness as he stared
at Sullivan, reading his face. "H'm," he muttered at last, "if I
ever do have to get a message out of there, I hope you'll be round to
carry it."
Something in his tone dragged Sullivan toward him with suddenly
blazing eyes. "Captain," he begged, demanding assurance from the man
who was his deity, "do you mean that? No jollyin' now, sir. You
sure think I can do it?"
"Think?" said the Captain. "H'm. I'm bankin' on you, Sullivan. I
know you can do it."
"Then," said Sullivan blissfully, "by God, I will, sir."
Early as it was next morning when Sullivan rose for his start, he
found the Captain's steady eyes on him. "You don't need your rifle,"
he said. "Nor your belt."
"I reckon not, sir," said Sullivan whimsically, "not for buggin'."
"You take that can of bacon out of my haversack," his officer
continued. "I've saved it for this."
"I don't need it none, sir," said Sullivan, edging away. "There'd
ought to be fine buggin' back along. An' hell-apples, I reckon."
"Take it," said Burrell shortly, and Sullivan yielded to the habit of
obedience. He turned for his journey.
"Hold on," his officer commanded. "You're forgettin' something." He
lifted a clawlike hand, and Sullivan gripped it for a minute in
silence. He strode across the little opening to the beginning of the
back trail. There he halted, turned, and hurled the tin of bacon at
his commander. "You go to hell, sir," he shrilled defiantly. "I'll
do fine, buggin',"--and he ran stumblingly down the trail.
The Captain twisted his head--it was the only movement he could
make--and watched the retreating figure of the mutineer. "H'm," he
muttered after it, and shut his eyes, to wait.
For the first few hours Sullivan, uplifted by the thought of his
mission, went on at what seemed to him a tremendous pace. In reality
his knees lifted jerkily, his feet came down flat and stiff, and his
stride was that of a child. A giddiness, too, overtook him now and
then, and a white mist drifted before his eyes. At such times the
walls of the trail seemed to rush by in a blur of green, and he had
an exhilarating sense of rapid movement.
Long before noon he had covered the three miles and a half to the
first camp on the back trail. There he hesitated. A temptingly
crumbly log lay beside the trail, and his stomach was cramped with
such hunger as he had not felt for days. But he halted only a
moment. "Time enough to eat to-night," he muttered, and went on.
The afternoon was harder. The giddiness and the mist assailed him
oftener, and several times, when the blankness became complete, he
was roused by finding that his face had come into not ungentle
contact with the ground. Once, doubling limply, he struck his face
on his knee instead, and a cut lip gave him the pleasant salty taste
of blood. Sharp pains of breathlessness stabbed his sides at
intervals, and his heart had fits of throbbing suffocatingly. But he
never halted as long as he could see. When the trail was only
blackness in the night he sank down.
The rain and the light woke him to an accusing sense that it had long
been day. He moved on at once. "I'll eat when I've made that up,"
he muttered, as the blur enclosed him.
That day was mostly blur until, along in the afternoon, his mind
cleared suddenly. The ground sloped upward under his feet. A rocky,
sparsely-wooded ridge rose above him. Remembrance tingled through
him. "My cactus-farm!" he cried, in delighted recognition. "I'm
gettin' almost there."
With his knees doubling under him, he clawed his way to the ridge,
and a well-remembered landscape lay about him, dark billows of
unbroken forest and a horizon of up-tumbled hills. The huge
emptiness of it smote him like a blow and he turned to the old camp.
The signs of human occupation, the remembrance of men who had spoken
there and of the words they had said, comforted him wonderfully.
"Here," he said, having fallen into a way of thinking aloud, "is
where I _eat_. They'd ought to be fine buggin' here."
But the ridge was disappointingly bare of provender. Not a rotten
log, not a seed pod, rewarded his toilsome search. At last, where a
hanging corner of rock had sheltered it, he came upon a torpid colony
of tiger-ants. He looked at them dubiously. "I wonder," he
muttered, "if anybody ever _et_ an ant? I reckon not. Don't seem to
be much _to_ th'm."
As he stirred the sluggish insects with a doubtful finger, one of
them set its mandibles in his flesh. Sullivan's eyes lit with
determination. "I'm hungrier'n you be, I reckon," he said gravely.
With the refreshing acidity of his experiment strong on his tongue,
he rose at last, regretfully. "It would seem kind of home-like
sleepin' here," he said. "But I reckon I'd better be gallopin'
along." And he pushed on till once more darkness brought him
merciful oblivion.
He woke to daylight with all his senses clear but one. He
understood--there had been times when he forgot even that--that he
was Sullivan, that behind him lay his comrades, starving, that before
him the trail led to men who needed but a word, and that he had been
chosen to take it. But his sense of time was gone. How long he had
slept he could not guess. It might have been one night, or many.
They might all have died behind him, those sick men and the Old Man
who banked on him.
In torture at the uncertainty, he rose and stumbled forward again.
After a while--it might have been an hour or many days--the trail
brought him to a torrential river. He recognized it dimly as the
Sabey. They had come up it once, sometime, any time, walking in its
rocky bed. Now its swirling waters covered the trail.
Painstakingly Sullivan collected his misty faculties. There was a
general feeling of morning in the air. By night he must be at Sabey,
he was convinced. He must hurry, therefore. A clear idea flashed
across his mind. A raft! He must build a raft and hurry with the
rushing river, since there was no more trail. He drew his heavy
knife-bayonet and turned to the woods. After a while darkness shut
down and stopped his work. But he had cut a good many poles.
The next thing he knew it was light again, so he dragged one of his
poles to the river and dropped it in. It sank. Another and another
did the same. When they touched the water they sank. When Sullivan
understood that his poles would not float, he lost his steady
hopefulness for the first time.
But after a while he turned wearily, and stumbled off along the
rocky, overhanging banks of Sabey River. When he had walked dizzily
a little distance, he fell and lay still. A fall on that cutting
volcanic rock was another matter from a fall on the trail. At last
he recovered enough to stagger on for a few more steps. Then he fell
again. That time he did not rise.
But the shock and the loss of blood cleared his head. At last he
recognized his predicament. He was through. There was no bitterness
in the thought. He had done his best, and failed. The torment of
hurry was gone, and he lay and watched the foaming river and the
overarching trees. "I can't do it," Sullivan told himself simply,
and quit.
But suddenly his merciless self assailed him. "There's another way,"
it urged. "You can do it. Th' Old Man said so. Try it."
Weakly, half-sobbing, Sullivan obeyed the summons, and got to his
knees. He put out a hand and planted it on the rock, drew up his
knee toward it, and his body swayed forward. He put out his other
hand, drew up his other knee, swayed forward again. He had gained a
foot, at least.
"By God," shouted Sullivan's self to him exultantly, "you can do it!
Try it again. You can't walk, but you can _crawl_, I reckon.
Whoop-eee-ee! Hit her up!"
And Sullivan, obedient as always, hit her up.
And so at last, seventeen days from the time he left Sabey, he
returned to it, a blind, gaunt, rain-beaten, silent, grimly crawling
thing. He had almost reached the barracks when a soldier, hurrying
through the rain, spied him and raised a shout. He revived for a
moment when they lifted him, and opened his eyes.
"Back along," faltered the messenger. "Starvin'. Hurry up. God!"
he sighed, and collapsed in their arms.
They carried him to the shack they called a hospital, and while the
relief party gathered and went out, twenty silent men loaded down
with rations, the post surgeon and his wife worked over him.
Suddenly the girl broke down.
"Oh!" she cried. "Look at his poor hands and knees! Oh, Will, what
did _that_ to him?"
"What?" stuttered the young surgeon gruffly. "What! Why, the--the
nervy son--son of a gun _walked_ on 'em, God knows how far, that's
all! Fill those water bottles, will you. And _hurry_ up."
Two days later Sullivan opened his eyes, and stared wonderingly at
the room, and the lamplight, and the _olla_ hanging in the window,
and the post surgeon's pretty wife, who sat beside his cot. At last
his eyes rested on his own hands, shapeless in bandages. And as he
looked at them his lips trembled, and he began to cry, weakly, like a
child.
The post surgeon's wife thought she understood, and her own breath
caught. She was very new to the Army, and she was trying to make a
hero of Sullivan. "Poor fellow," she murmured, "I know they're bad.
But we'll fix them up. Don't cry about them."
"I ain't c-cryin'!" Sullivan whispered, in tremulous indignation.
"I'm l-laughin'. I reckon," he muttered, and a ripple of the old
whimsicality swept across his face, "I must be about th' first man
ever wore his hands to a blister, walkin'." The wonder of the
thought held him entranced.
The girl thought he was light-headed. "Is there anything you'd
like?" she asked soothingly.
Sullivan considered. "Salt," he announced emphatically. "I want
salt. Ev'ry drop you've got in th' place. What're you lookin' at?
Salt's cheap enough, ain't it? Well, I want some. Seems like I
hadn't had no salt f'r years."
How the relief party did its work is another story, and a brave one.
It is hard to kill strong men by exhaustion, and, by the time
Sullivan could walk a little, the Captain and the other rescued men
were sitting up in bed. At last a day came when Burrell was
permitted to have one visitor. "Send Sullivan," he ordered.
The lanky fellow shuffled in bashfully, and stood with averted eyes.
"Glad to see you're back, sir," he muttered.
"Well," asked Burrell gruffly, "you can shake hands, can't you?"
Sullivan, grinning sheepishly, held up a muffled paw. "I reckon not,
sir," he said.
"What's the matter with 'em?" the Captain demanded.
"Blistered th'm, sir," Sullivan responded with solemn joy.
"Blistered th'm, walkin'."
"H'm," the Captain muttered. His eyes were burning into the man.
"Sullivan," he said abruptly, "there's a can of bacon in my haversack
that belongs to you."
Sullivan gulped. Discipline had him by the heels again. "Beg y'
pardon, sir," he mumbled nervously. "I reckon I must a been sort of
loco that day."
"Well," said the Old Man of B Company gravely, "maybe I'll let it go
this time. But see it don't happen again. H'm."